• by editor , January 19, 2016

Sheriff Sorrell. It’s got a nice ring to it. Not as classy, perhaps, as Sir Martin, but in 2015, under the leadership of its outspoken and iconoclastic founder and CEO, WPP strode across the media ecosystem, determined to use its clout to create a more competitive and transparent marketplace.

In its sights in the last year were some of the most vexing industry challenges: competition in measurement options, near-monopolies in ad technology and Internet piracy. The world’s largest media buyer made bold moves internally and externally to address all of these challenges. For its efforts to create a cleaner and more competitive marketplace, WPP is Mediapost’s 2015 Holding Company of the Year.

Internally, WPP completed equity deals begun in 2014 — and completed one merger in the fall — designed to create more competition against entrenched giants like Nielsen, Google and Facebook. The holding company exchanged its ad-serving technology company 24/7 Real Media with AppNexus in exchange for a stake in the latter, a major player in programmatic, whose servers process up to 45 billion ad buys per day. 

Sorrell’s characteristically canny move creates more competition in the market versus Google’s Doubleclick and Facebook’s Atlas. Sir Martin told the Wall Street Journal that “The only alternative to AppNexus is to align with Facebook or Google. At least we’re agnostic.” 

Bolstering that move, WPP has invested heavily in GroupM’s trading desk, Xaxis, which now leads the space with about 10 percent of the total programmatic marketplace. The unit serves more than 2,800 WPP clients in 45 markets across the world, and in November its founder, Brian Lesser, was elevated to CEO of GroupM North America.

WPP also spun off its Kantar Research unit for an equity stake in entertainment media measurement leader Rentrak, a move that unites Kantar’s digital media and purchase data with the latter’s national and local TV measurement and directly targets Nielsen’s dominance of the market. In September, cross-platform measurement strength was added when Rentrak and comScore entered into a stock-for-stock merger.

Externally, WPP kept the heat on in its determined effort to fight piracy and ensure transparency in the marketplace. The target was counterfeit websites, which steal copyrighted content and mirror real websites, often to an astonishing level of detail. It’s a malevolent trap for brands who unwittingly buy such sites.

Under the leadership of John Montgomery, chairman of WPP media umbrella arm GroupM North America and co-chair of the anti-piracy effort from the joint AAA/ANA/IAB Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), the holding company intensified its ongoing war against fraud with a focus on counterfeit websites and their malign effects, by requiring all of its media partners to receive anti-piracy certification from TAG.

“Picture, for a moment, a 1961 Ferrari 250GT California Spider, the iconic car made famous in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” wrote Montgomery in a MediaDailyNews column. “After thousands of hours of painstaking and meticulous restoration, the interior is flawless, the body is immaculate, and the engine hums like it just left the factory. If you spent years of your life perfecting that symbol of automotive excellence, would you toss the keys to some stranger in a dangerous part of town?”